On one of these occasions Gerald also told me about the flights he had made over the gleaming, snow-covered mountains in his Cessna, over the volcanic peaks of the Puy-de-Dôme region, down the beautiful Garonne and on to Bordeaux.
I suppose it was inevitable that he would fail to come home from one of these flights, said Austerlitz. It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time.
*
Almost quarter of a year had passed before I next went to London and visited Austerlitz in his house in Alderney Street. On our parting in December we had agreed that I would wait to receive news from him. As the weeks went by I had felt less and less sure whether I would ever hear from him again, fearing at various times that I might have made a thoughtless remark, or offended him in some other way. It also occurred to me that, following his old custom, he might simply have gone away with some unknown purpose in mind and for an indefinite period. Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently. But at any rate, one day my mail included a picture postcard from the 1920s or 1930s showing a camp of white tents in the Egyptian desert, a picture taken during a campaign now remembered by no one, the message on the back saying merely Saturday 19 March, Alderney Street, followed by a question mark and a capital A for Austerlitz. Alderney Street is quite a long way out in the East End of London. It is a remarkably quiet street running parallel to the main road not far from the Mile End junction, where there are always traffic jams and, on such Saturdays, market traders set up their stalls of clothes and fabrics on the pavements.
Thinking back now, I see again a low block of flats like a fortress standing on the corner of the street; a garish green kiosk with its wares openly laid out, though there was never anyone behind the counter; a cast-iron fence round a patch of grass on which you might think no one had ever trodden; and the brick wall on the right, about fifty yards long and as tall as a man. At the end of it I found the house where Austerlitz lived, the first in a row of six or seven. The interior, which appeared to be very spacious, contained only the most essential furniture and no curtains or carpets. The walls were painted a pale shade of matt gray, and the floorboards were also gray, but of a rather darker hue. Apart from what seemed to me a curiously elongated, old-fashioned ottoman, the front room, into which Austerlitz took me first, had nothing in it but a large table, also varnished matt gray, with several dozen photographs lying on it, most of them dating quite a long way back and rather worn at the edges. Some of the pictures were already familiar to me, so to speak: pictures of empty Belgian landscapes, stations and Métro viaducts in Paris, the palm house in the Jardin des Plantes, various moths and other night-flying insects, ornate dovecotes, Gerald Fitzpatrick on the airfield near Quy, and a number of heavy doors and gateways. Austerlitz told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if playing a game of patience, and that then, one by one, he turned them over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the game until either there was nothing left but the gray tabletop, or he felt exhausted by the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had to rest on the ottoman. I often lie here until late in the evening, feeling time roll back, said Austerlitz, as we passed into the sitting room at the rear, where he lit the little gas fire and invited me to sit down on one of the chairs standing on either side of the hearth. This room too contained hardly any furniture; there were just the gray floorboards and the walls on which the light of the flickering blue flames was now cast in the gathering dusk. I can still hear the faint hiss of the gas, and I remember that while Austerlitz was making tea in the kitchen I sat entranced by the reflection of the little fire, which looked as if it were burning at some distance from the house on the other side of the glazed veranda doors, among the now almost pitch-black bushes in the garden. When Austerlitz had brought the tea tray in and was holding slices of white bread on a toasting fork in front of the blue gas flames, I said something about the incomprehensibility of mirror images, to which he replied that he often sat in this room after nightfall, staring at the apparently motionless spot of light reflected out there in the darkness, and when he did so he inevitably thought of a Rembrandt exhibition he had seen once, many years ago, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where he had not felt inclined to linger before any of the large-scale masterpieces which have been reproduced over and over again, but instead stood for a long time looking at a small painting measuring at most nine by twelve inches, from the Dublin collection, as far as he remembered, which according to its label showed the Flight into Egypt, although he could make out neither Mary and Joseph, nor the child Jesus, nor the ass, but only a tiny flicker of fire in the middle of the gleaming black varnish of the darkness which, said Austerlitz, he could see in his mind’s eye to this day.—But where, he continued, shall I take up my story? When I came back from France I bought this house for what today is the positively ridiculous sum of nine hundred and fifty pounds, and then I taught for almost thirty years until I took early retirement in 1991, partly, said Austerlitz, because of the inexorable spread of ignorance even to the universities, and partly because I hoped to set out on paper my investigations into the history of architecture and civilization, as had long been my intention. I might perhaps, Austerlitz said to me, have had some idea since our first conversations in Antwerp of the extent of his interests, the drift of his ideas, and the nature of his observations and comments, always made extempore or first recorded in provisional form, but eventually covering thousands of pages. Even in Paris, said Austerlitz, I had thought of collecting my fragmentary studies in a book, although I constantly postponed writing it. The various ideas I entertained at different times of this book I was to write ranged from the concept of a systematically descriptive work in several volumes to a series of essays on such subjects as hygiene and sanitation, the architecture of the penal system, secular temples, hydrotherapy, zoological gardens, departure and arrival, light and shade, steam and gas, and so forth. However, even a first glance at the papers I had brought here from the Institute to Alderney Street showed that they consisted largely of sketches which now seemed misguided, distorted, and of little use. I began to assemble and recast anything that still passed muster in order to re-create before my own eyes, as if in the pages of an album, the picture of the landscape, now almost immersed in oblivion, through which my journey had taken me. But the more I labored on this project over several months the more pitiful did the results seem. I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years.